An LGBT school opt-out – if you can afford it

According to the Times young children in private primary schools may no longer have to be explicitly taught about gay marriage, cohabiting couples, or same-sex families.

In spite of the Department of Education’s briefing, highlighted in The Conservative Woman on Wednesday, which stated that the government would respect parents’ rights to withdraw their children from relationships and sex education, but not from relationships teaching in primary schools, this seems likely to be watered down in independent – ie fee-paying – primary schools.

This looks like a blatant U-turn by ministers giving protected rights to well-off parents, and follows intensive lobbying by private faith schools after reports that they were being downgraded over a failure by teachers to highlight explicitly LGBT issues during lessons. For example a private Jewish primary school for girls was downgraded for failing to teach girls up to the age of eight about homosexual practices or gender reassignment. Ofsted claimed they were being denied ‘a full understanding of fundamental British values’.

TCW has already highlighted that parents of primary school children are facing the denial of choice and responsibility in this issue. There have been controversies in the secondary sector too. But if it transpires that if you are rich enough and claim a faith-based opt-out, you can retain a measure of control against the state’s sex education brainwashing, there must surely be a massive backlash from the vast majority of ordinary parents who cannot, or choose not to, afford private education, but have very clear opinions and preferences about what their little ones should be taught at school.

A burning social injustice, you could say, Mrs May.

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